The Nebraska Sandhills

North-central Nebraska contains the largest grass-stabilized sand dune system in the Western Hemisphere. The Nebraska Sandhills cover roughly nineteen thousand square miles, an area larger than many states. From the air, or from the top of a dune on a clear day, the landscape looks like a frozen sea: wave after wave of rounded hills, softened by grass that has held them in place for the last few thousand years.

The grass is what makes the Sandhills a livable landscape. The sandy soil beneath will not support plowing or row crops. Attempts to farm it with a plow failed repeatedly in the early settlement era. Remove the grass and the dunes would begin to move. As a pasture for cattle, however, the Sandhills are remarkably productive. The region has the highest concentration of cow-calf ranches in the United States, spread across counties with some of the lowest population densities in the lower forty-eight states.

Nearly two thousand lakes sit in the Sandhills, most of them shallow and windswept and visible only from elevated ground. The water table here is very close to the surface. Beneath the dunes lies a significant portion of the Ogallala Aquifer, the great underground reserve which is recharged here as rain and snowmelt soak quickly down through the sandy soils.

The Sandhills are one of the least-altered large landscapes remaining in North America. They look today much as they did when the first European explorers crossed them, which is to say: vast, grass-covered, and entirely themselves.